AAP is a Force for Good

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is changing India’s politics for the better, and for good. It is making other parties change, by the force of its own example, and this might prove to be its lasting contribution rather than its own direct achievements. Except in Kerala, democracy is an abstract norm in India, not the lived reality it should be. The entrenched personnel of the state lack any accountability to the people, in whose name and for whose welfare they have been appointed. The state rules over its subjects, those manning it constituting an oppressive, kleptocratic elite. Nominal democracy means the periodic shuffling of the political executive, whose main focus is on looting the resources of the nation while it has the opportunity to. Of course, some welfare crumbs are distributed to the people, as a necessary cost of the competitive process for becoming the political executive of the moment. And the nominal framework of democracy allows social anger and distress to be dissipated and alleviated before they reach any threshold of explosion. Liberalization and globalization have dispersed prosperity and access to the means of communications across large sections of the population. The process gained momentum over the past 10 years, with nominal democracy seeking to achieve greater legitimacy by expanding nominal democratic rights, such as the right to information and the forest rights law that decriminalizes the very existence of India’s tribal people. These two trends have combined to crystallize popular resentment against the oppressive state into a political movement. When Subjects Become Citizens AAP and its wild, enthusiastic support, at least in the cities, represent the Indian people’s aspiration and effort to transform themselves from subjects to citizens, something that nominally happened when India gained Independence but did not, in reality. The elite underestimate the appeal of AAP’s stress on people’s gatherings — mohalla sabhas, etc — but these offer the people their first shot at real political empowerment. When Kejriwal was chief minister of Delhi, the parking lot attendant in front of our office told the cop who came to collect his regular pay-off that he would complain to the chief minister. The cop went away, but came back and collected his money the day after Kejriwal resigned. In contrast, the Congress offers patronage. You give us power, and we will give you houses, roads, jobs, all sorts of rights. Rahul Gandhi, for all his obsession with opening up the system, is not able to shift gears from patronage to empowerment. The BJP offers a more subtle cocktail. The ingredient it flaunts in polite society is the saviour of the millenarian dreams of all primitive traditions, the miracle worker from Gujarat, who, on his own, would right every wrong and set everything right. The darker, stronger stuff that goes into its political mix is on display when it felicitates the MLAs who played a lead role in the recent Muzaffarnagar riots, playing on another, more recent myth, of the majority being victimised in its own land. Shaking Up Cosy Relationships But apart from its vigorous commitment to opening up a third front of empowerment, AAP has little to offer by way of clear policy. Their leaders’ ideas are confused, contradictory and often self-defeating. For example, it makes a big deal of opposing Reliance Industries chief Mukesh Ambani. The chief beneficiary of its opposition to foreign direct investment in retail is none other than Reliance itself, which has no plans to sell out to a foreign investor unlike some other Indian retail players, and benefits from the absence of aggressive, competent competition. AAP is clearly out of its depth when it pronounces on gas prices or power tariffs. AAP is, however, less interested in their specificities than in the theme it wants to highlight using these examples: a cosy nexus between business and politics that is inimical to the people. And it has the most potent weapon to dismantle this cosy relationship: its own wholly transparent method of raising political funding. Mainstream parties raise money via loot of the exchequer, sale of patronage to business and plain extortion. Businessmen bankroll individual politicians, who pass on a portion of what they get to the party. Since this method of raising political funding entails collusion by civil servants, it suborns them and makes the entire administration dysfunctional and bereft of accountability. India’s polity is evolving towards deepening of democracy and greater accountability. AAP is an instrumentality of that evolution. It might self-destruct in the process of forcing this change through, it might flourish as an alternative that truly champions the spirit of liberal democracy that the Constitution seeks to articulate as the law or it might degenerate into the power-for-its-own sake paradigm of mainstream parties. Which way things will go, no one can forecast at this stage. What is absolutely clear is that we are better off with the emergence of AAP and it is a project that needs to propel ahead.

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AAP is a force for good

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is changing India’s politics for the better, and for good. It is making other parties change, by the force of its own example, and this might prove to be its lasting contribution rather than its own direct achievements. Except in Kerala, democracy is an abstract norm in India, not the lived reality it should be. The entrenched personnel of the state lack any accountability to the people, in whose name and for whose welfare they have been appointed. The state rules over its subjects, those manning it constituting an oppressive, kleptocratic elite. Nominal democracy means the periodic shuffling of the political executive, whose main focus is on looting the resources of the nation while it has the opportunity to. Of course, some welfare crumbs are distributed to the people, as a necessary cost of the competitive process for becoming the political executive of the moment. And the nominal framework of democracy allows social anger and distress to be dissipated and alleviated before they reach any threshold of explosion. Liberalization and globalization have dispersed prosperity and access to the means of communications across large sections of the population. The process gained momentum over the past 10 years, with nominal democracy seeking to achieve greater legitimacy by expanding nominal democratic rights, such as the right to information and the forest rights law that decriminalizes the very existence of India’s tribal people. These two trends have combined to crystallize popular resentment against the oppressive state into a political movement. When Subjects Become Citizens AAP and its wild, enthusiastic support, at least in the cities, represent the Indian people’s aspiration and effort to transform themselves from subjects to citizens, something that nominally happened when India gained Independence but did not, in reality. The elite underestimate the appeal of AAP’s stress on people’s gatherings — mohalla sabhas, etc — but these offer the people their first shot at real political empowerment. When Kejriwal was chief minister of Delhi, the parking lot attendant in front of our office told the cop who came to collect his regular pay-off that he would complain to the chief minister. The cop went away, but came back and collected his money the day after Kejriwal resigned. In contrast, the Congress offers patronage. You give us power, and we will give you houses, roads, jobs, all sorts of rights. Rahul Gandhi, for all his obsession with opening up the system, is not able to shift gears from patronage to empowerment. The BJP offers a more subtle cocktail. The ingredient it flaunts in polite society is the saviour of the millenarian dreams of all primitive traditions, the miracle worker from Gujarat, who, on his own, would right every wrong and set everything right. The darker, stronger stuff that goes into its political mix is on display when it felicitates the MLAs who played a lead role in the recent Muzaffarnagar riots, playing on another, more recent myth, of the majority being victimised in its own land. Shaking Up Cosy Relationships But apart from its vigorous commitment to opening up a third front of empowerment, AAP has little to offer by way of clear policy. Their leaders’ ideas are confused, contradictory and often self-defeating. For example, it makes a big deal of opposing Reliance Industries chief Mukesh Ambani. The chief beneficiary of its opposition to foreign direct investment in retail is none other than Reliance itself, which has no plans to sell out to a foreign investor unlike some other Indian retail players, and benefits from the absence of aggressive, competent competition. AAP is clearly out of its depth when it pronounces on gas prices or power tariffs. AAP is, however, less interested in their specificities than in the theme it wants to highlight using these examples: a cosy nexus between business and politics that is inimical to the people. And it has the most potent weapon to dismantle this cosy relationship: its own wholly transparent method of raising political funding. Mainstream parties raise money via loot of the exchequer, sale of patronage to business and plain extortion. Businessmen bankroll individual politicians, who pass on a portion of what they get to the party. Since this method of raising political funding entails collusion by civil servants, it suborns them and makes the entire administration dysfunctional and bereft of accountability. India’s polity is evolving towards deepening of democracy and greater accountability. AAP is an instrumentality of that evolution. It might self-destruct in the process of forcing this change through, it might flourish as an alternative that truly champions the spirit of liberal democracy that the Constitution seeks to articulate as the law or it might degenerate into the power-for-its-own sake paradigm of mainstream parties. Which way things will go, no one can forecast at this stage. What is absolutely clear is that we are better off with the emergence of AAP and it is a project that needs to propel ahead.